


pulling a rabbit out of a hat

by acceptnosubstitutes



Series: the ot3 to end all ot3s [4]
Category: Falling Skies
Genre: Gen, Multi, Rabbits, Sex Pollen, bad language, but not really, unmitigated cute shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-08
Updated: 2014-08-08
Packaged: 2018-02-12 09:20:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2104245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acceptnosubstitutes/pseuds/acceptnosubstitutes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dominate, bun buns, and weird Esphenni experiments, oh my.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pulling a rabbit out of a hat

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: [Imagine your OTP as little fluffy bunnies.](http://otpprompts.tumblr.com/post/87609063681/imagine-your-otp-as-little-fluffy-bunnies)

Rabbits.

Hal holds the fluffy, pepper white rabbit out at arms length. Brings it closer and peers into its eyes. They’re dark brown, which is the right color, but. Seriously?

He deposits the rabbit in his lap, where it happily cuddles up in the crook of his leg and almost immediately slips off to sleep.

“No, Ben,” Hal says, in his best authoritative voice, “really, where are they?”

Ben sighs. He has two of the fluffy creatures. The jet black one currently at crawling around on his shoulders, attempting to climb his head. Its success is debatable. Mostly it just makes Ben twitch, because he’s ticklish there, in the crook of his neck.

The more adventurous rabbit, a tawny colored thing with darker brown patches on its nose and paws, butts noses with the black rabbit and then wiggles out of Ben’s lap, escaping the hands that try and capture it with a timely burst of speed.

“I told you,” and Ben’s starting to sound frustrated.

He detaches the black rabbit from around his neck.

“Anne.”

Scoops up the brown rabbit and watches it bunny kick his chest in an attempt to get away.

“Dad.”

“And that,” he indicates the pepper white one, who’s become a tiny little furnace against Hal’s leg, “that’s Dai.”

“And now they’re rabbits.”

Ben nods. “Now they’re rabbits.”

Hal settles a hand on the head of the bunny in his lap, scratches it lightly behind the ears. Its fur feels soft, almost silky, and the bunny butts its head against his hand when he stops. Unconsciously, he resumes stroking its head down its neck and across its back. It’s like petting a cat.

“Do you know how absurd that sounds? Are you on drugs?”

Ben scowls. But before he can tell his brother off, he scrambles up, chasing after brown rabbit, or dad rabbit, Hal supposes. The thing’s managed to escape the half circle Hal and his brother make up on the ground and is determinedly hopping away, nowhere in particular.

Rabbit retrieved, Ben slumps back down and levels a glare at it that, were Hal taking this serious, it almost seems to return in that dry way their father does. It continues kicking at him, this time the side of his leg.

Anne rabbit, and Hal feels ridiculous, for humoring his brother, but whatever, Anne rabbit hops up on Ben’s other leg and tucks her feet neatly under her body.

They, it’s ridiculous, it really is, seem to act like them too.

Dad rabbit, a curious, stubborn thing intent on exploring his new environment.

Anne rabbit, curious in her own way, settles down after a while and proceeds to thoroughly clean her fur.

Dai rabbit, well, might be the odd one out. Dai, as a person isn’t typically cuddly. Not that Hal would really know. But he doesn’t seem like the type.

Of course, Dai rabbit is the most calm of the three of them, agreeably remaining where Hal put him and doesn’t seem to be rattled by the fact, according to Ben, he was once a person.

If rabbits even do rattled.

“Okay,” Hal says, sighing, “why is our dad and, the others,” it’s awkward, trying to figure out what to call Dai and Anne, who are closer than family, yet not quite second dad or mom territory, “why are they now rabbits?”

“I don’t know,” Ben says.

Hal raises an eyebrow at him, leaning forward. He doesn’t, however, forget to keep petting the rabbit in his lap.

It’s sorta pleasant, really, but he’ll never admit it.

Ben shrugs.

“You don’t know.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well,” Hal says, gives him a frustrated sigh, “do you know when they’ll turn _back_?”

Ben shrugs, again.

“All I know,” he says, “is that dad found this flower.”

“A flower,” Hal says, flatly.

“Yeah, a flower. It’s dark purple with these, like, veins? These red veins, along the petals.”

“Wait, what? You _let_ dad touch a freaky flower?”

Ben huffs, preventing dad rabbit from escaping yet again. “Yeah, Hal, I let dad touch the freaky flower. Geez, he was all over it before any of us could say anything. Anne grabbed it when dad, well, you see the results, and I guess she touched Dai, too, because then they were all rabbits.”

Hal stares dubiously at the rabbit in his lap, now awake. And chewing on the grass he can reach from his location.

“Think its a freaky alien thing?

Ben gives him a look.

“Right. Of course its a freaky alien thing.”

“Oh, wait,” Ben says, reaching inside his pocket, “I brought a sample of the flower back with us.”

Hal tackles his brother, forgetting for the moment he’s squishing what is technically his father, and Anne, between them.

“Don’t touch it!”

In the ensuing tussle, one of the rabbits and Hal thinks he sees a flash of black, bites his arm. Right above his sleeve, sinking into bare skin.

“Oww! What the hell? Rabbits have teeth?”

Ben snorts at him, scooting back with the flower held, delicately in the palm of a gloved hand, over his head. Anne rabbit has since joined Dai rabbit, cuddling into his side with, and Hal is seriously not joking, the evilest look he’s ever seen on a rabbit in his life.

Dad rabbit, of course, makes a break for it, and the brothers spend five or ten minutes trying to locate him through the tall grass.

With the brown rabbit secured, actually behaving itself where he’s crossed to Ben’s chest by his free arm, Hal scoops up the pepper white one and then, narrowing his eyes, the black rabbit too.

“Look, rabbit,” he tells the black rabbit, holding her by the scruff of her neck, “you bite me again, and I don’t care if you’re Anne or not, I’ll -”

Which is, of course, the moment Dai rabbit decides he’s had enough of being left out of the fun and bites him too, just a shade to the left of where Anne rabbit had previously.

“Seriously Hal,” Ben says, sounds amused while he watches his brother hop around and miraculously not drop either rabbit, “you know Dai and Anne. You bite one…”

“You bite the other,” Hal mutters, cross, “and _they’re_ the ones who bit me!”

“Let’s just get back to Cochise, before we’re left with rabbits for parents. Sure the Volm know _something_.”

-

Sure enough, the Volm do have a clue. Only, when they relay the story to Cochise, and the brothers show him the flower, he breaks out into laughter.

That goes on, and on, and on. Really, Hal ponders thumping him on the back, the way he’s bent over and wheezing.

Cochise regains composure at last, clearing his throat. “I, apologize. Your father and friends appear to have come across an, how do I put this delicately, an Espheni experiment. You see, the Espheni make the most of their environment when they choose a planet, to, ah, acquire…subjects. For future experimentation.”

Ben and Hal stare blankly at him. Cochise blinks.

“Oh dear, that was most insensitive, was it not? I apologize for that, as well. In other terms, they modify the local flora and fauna to suit their purposes.”

Ben and Hal continue to stare.

“Which are…?”

“The flower in question, the dark purple flower with red veining. It is, well, it usually conveys some form of, of an aphrodisiac effect.”

Both Hal and Ben nod, like it’s the first normal thing that’s happened since the whole rabbit affair began. Then Hal pauses. Cocks his head.

“So, sex pollen? Are you telling me _my dad_ ,” his voice sounds oddly high-pitched, and strained, “picked up a, a _sex pollen flower_?”

“We’re just gonna ignore the ramifications of why the Esphenni would want a sex pollen flower in the first place,” Ben adds, nodding very rapidly.

But Hal catches up to his brother’s line of thinking and whines in dismay. “I need _so_ much brain bleach right now, I’m not even joking.”

“What I don’t get,” Ben says, crossing his arms, “is why they turned into rabbits. Shouldn’t they have…”

He trails off, turning to look at the three very-much-still-rabbits, all plopped up in a pile on the nearby table. Sleeping away this entire conversation. Lucky them.

Everyone seems to be touching everyone else, at least in one place or another.

He shudders, and looks away.

“Sometimes Esphenni experiments and local conditions, shall we say, do not agree with each other. Apparently,” Cochise explains, “this “sex pollen flower” as you say, translates to these small, fluffy mammals you humans call rabbits.”

“I believe,” Cochise adds, blinking innocently, “that the proper term for such a situation is ‘fucking like rabbits’?”

He smiles, hesitantly, looking so happy to finally be successfully acclimating into human custom that Ben and Hal don’t have the heart to explain to him how utterly inappropriate that particular metaphor is concerning these particular people.

That, and that’s not a conversation either want to touch with a thirty foot pole.

“All right,” Hal says, shaking his head as if to clear it of the thought of his dad, Anne, and Dai…urgh, Hal just shakes his head harder, “so who’s teaching Cochise _things_ and what do I have to pay to get them to _stop_?”

-

The Esphenni ‘sex pollen flower’ wears off in a few days. Tom gets a long, detailed, discussion about why touching random, unknown elements in the field is a bad, bad thing, and life continues.

If Tom seems more intent than ever to climb up, and over, and under every tree, rock, hill and other landscape elements, if Dai develops a strange, and unnerving habit, because it’s Dai, of randomly hugging everyone who happens to cross his path, and if Anne, much to Hal’s constant alarm, bites down at every meal with more force than absolutely necessary, well.

They could be fucking like rabbits, instead.


End file.
